Getting a supermarket listing can feel like reaching a destination. You’ve made it. There is a feeling of legitimacy and a sense of validation.
But there is also a reality. The listing is not the destination. Far from it – it is only the starting point.
What happens after is harder, more expensive, and far less discussed than the pitch that got you there or the work that so many put in to reach that point.
This article is built around three brands who have navigated grocery at different scales, from different starting points, with very different tools available to them.
Between them, they cover Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, and Tesco — a representative picture of what UK grocery actually looks like in 2026.
For gin, the channel is changing. The gin fixture is leaner than it has been in years. Buyers are better informed. Consumers are more deliberate and the promotional mechanics are more unforgiving than almost anyone models before they sign.
If you are building toward a supermarket listing, or managing one, this is for you.
Why the supermarket gin shelf looks different in 2026
Walk the gin fixture in a typical supermarket today and it looks different to five years ago. Fewer bottles. Fewer facings. Less noise.
The easy narrative is that brands have disappeared. The more accurate one is that the major players have been rationalised. Gordon’s, Beefeater and others no longer have three or four brightly coloured flavoured expressions, each with two facings. The bloated era defined by the pink and flavoured gin explosion is over.
Take Waitrose as a specific example. The gin fixture has moved from five and a half shelves in a standard six-bay spirits plan down to four shelves. Around 14 lines were cut in a range rebuild — the first complete reset of that scale since 2019.
What replaced them was a tighter, more intentional fixture. Fewer duplications. More clearly differentiated brands at each price point.
Here is the context that matters most though. In a standard six-bay Waitrose spirits plan, own-label and Gordon’s together still account for approximately two thirds of gin sold in a week.
Everything else — the craft brands, the premium expressions, the story-led producers — competes for the remaining volume. At the £30 to £40 price point where most craft gins sit, a brand delivering two to three units per store per week is holding its own.
The supermarket shelf can feel like the destination for an independent brand. But the stats show that it is fundamentally a channel designed around multinationals and own-label — built for volume, margin efficiency, and brands that need no introduction.
So, while the opportunity for independents is real, it pays to remember that the channel is built for someone else, on terms built for someone else.
Not every supermarket is the right supermarket for your gin brand
Supermarket is not one word. It describes a range of very different retail environments with different customers, different buyers, different margin expectations, and a different relationship with craft and independent brands.
Waitrose is the environment most discussed in craft gin circles, and for good reason. Gin grew into the biggest individual category within its spirits portfolio, with retail sales running at around £48.5 million in 2022. Against the backdrop of overall gin volume decline, Waitrose reported craft gin sales growing 50% in a single year as recently as 2024.
It looks and feels premium, and the story-led end of the market is holding here in a way it is not everywhere else.
Sainsbury’s has built a structured route in for independent brands through its Future Brands programme — an initiative explicitly designed to nurture smaller, innovative producers rather than expecting them to operate like established players from day one.
Tesco, Asda, and Morrisons operate in a different register. They are clearly volume-first environments where multinational-owned brands and value-end gin dominate the fixture. A craft gin at £38 sits on the same shelf as half a dozen own-label and multinationals at £18-20, which creates pricing pressure throughout the fixture.
Booths sits in its own category — regionally specific, with a genuine appetite for championing local and independent producers. M&S takes the opposite approach, favouring tightly curated own-label and exclusive collaborations over independent brands.
Meanwhile, for brands building DTC and premium off-trade simultaneously, Ocado can serve as a useful proof-of-concept before a full supermarket conversation — sitting somewhere between specialist online retail like The Whisky Exchange or Master of Malt and traditional supermarket territory.
Understanding the differences between each matters. Supermarkets are a far more nuanced set of retail environments than people see upfront.
The shelf hook: the one thing you need before any conversation starts
Before the commercial plan. Before the pitch deck and before the buyer meeting. There has to be a reason a stranger picks up a bottle.
The discovery moment in a supermarket is brief and, mostly, entirely unaided. There is no bartender to explain the botanicals or provide the perfect serve. No brand ambassador at the fixture.
Just the bottle, the label, and two seconds of attention before the shopper moves on, or reaches for it.
Call it what you want – cool factor, stickiness, magnetism or something else, but what is universal to the brands who do well is that they have a visible, legible hook that functions on shelf without explanation.
Take Penrhos Gin for example, which reflects its values through its packaging. The aluminium bottle is unusual. It sits differently on a shelf of glass. The sustainability claim is also visible and instant.
“Once shoppers pick it up, it becomes a storytelling tool. It helps communicate our eco credentials quickly and tangibly, without needing a long explanation.”
Harriet Dawes, Co-founder, Penrhos.
The hook does not have to be the bottle.
Kinobi and Ukiyo sell Japanese heritage, Hayman’s sells affordable luxury, and James Gin sells recognition. For James Gin, the name does the work before anything else. But the awareness behind that name is not passive. It is the product of sustained digital effort.
The question every brand needs to answer before approaching a buyer is this. What is your shelf hook?
Not your values statement. Not your botanical list. The single tangible thing that makes a stranger reach for it in a crowded aisle where every bottle is competing for the same two seconds of consideration.
If you take the examples above, you can see three very different hooks, yet they share one quality: none of them require deep explanation.
Generic craft credentials like small batch, hand-crafted, distinct botanicals are table stakes. They do not function as hooks. The shelf is full of them, and the buyer knows it.
Shelf hooks and cool aesthetics aside, there is also a fundamental rule that applies to every brand regardless of budget or ambition – the liquid needs to deliver:
“The liquid inside needs to match the bottle, and the bottle needs to match the liquid. One can’t be greater than the other. Selling one bottle is one thing, but it’s about selling the second and third.”
Michael Morrison, Co-Founder, Isle of Barra Distillers.
Getting a supermarket listing is the easy part. Keeping it is not.
I want to be direct about something that does not get said enough in this industry.
The listing announcement is not the hardest milestone to achieve. Survival past the first range review is, growth into more stores is. So many brand owners point this out quickly:
“Getting the listing is arguably the easiest bit, keeping and increasing it is more difficult.” Vishal Patel, CEO, James Gin. “Don’t get too caught up. You’ve got to instantly start thinking about how you can keep that listing.” – Michael Morrison
Buyers watch rate of sale from the week a product lands. There is no honeymoon period. A brand that is not selling does not keep its shelf position, regardless of how well the pitch went or how much the buyer believed in the story at the time.
Most craft brands optimise for sell-in and underinvest in sell-through.
They spend months preparing the pitch and securing the listing — then over-rely on the shelf to do the work as they work through the logistical hurdles that come with managing the supply chain needs.
And while there is always a huge demand to get the product to where it’s needed – it’s easy to forget that the product needs to move on from there too. That requires investment in everything the buyer cannot do on your behalf: consumer awareness, in-store engagement, promotional activation, and relationships with the store-level staff who will recommend your gin to a customer who asks.
Partial listings are how almost every craft brand starts, and that is the right way to approach it. A nationwide launch into 500 stores from day one is extremely rare for an independent producer.
More commonly, a retailer opens a regional or store-type-specific trial first.
Isle of Barra Gin launched into 127 Waitrose branches before the listing expanded. That decision reflected both the buyer’s risk management and the brand’s own operational readiness. The expansion — from 127 to 209 stores in a short space of time — only came because the rate of sale supported it.
“That jump was massive for us and honestly hard to put into words. The expansion was really driven by performance and confidence — Waitrose could see it working, and that belief translated into rapid growth in distribution.“
Michael Morrison
That sequence is the model to aspire to: start where you can deliver, prove velocity, let the data make the case for growth.
There is a big psychological shift and succeeding involves resetting expectations and a change in mindset. Meanwhile, the operational reality lands just as fast and managing the two in tandem often feels overwhelming to begin with.
“Our first order into 400+ stores was 15,000 bottles which we distilled and bottled at the farm. Almost everything operationally needed levelling up. You go from being very in control of your sales environment to being one of many on a shelf.
Harriet Dawes
It takes some adjustment.“
When matters, so does the how
Despite my love of flavour and my obsession with excellence in the glass, a successful pitch is almost never about the liquid. The liquid is the entry ticket and the minimum requirement. The pitch is about the business case.
What is the promotional plan, what is the media plan, and how much are you prepared to invest in the retailer in year one?
The reason for this is structural. A spirits buyer at a major retailer manages the full P&L for the category — sales, volume, profit, margin, bonuses, promotional activity, secondary space, and the ranging itself. Every listing decision sits inside that P&L.
A buyer at a major retailer is not simply measuring gross margin on your product.
Reductions, promotional costs, wastage, theft, and bonus arrangements all feed into the final number they are accountable for. A brand presenting a compelling product with no thought for those mechanics is only presenting half a picture.
Story and USP matter enormously — but they have to connect to commercial viability.
Why will someone pick your gin up over the one next to it? What is the plan to drive that awareness?
Timing is also more important than most brands realise. Major retailers work to sequencing windows and there are defined periods in the year when new listings are actively considered. Each window starts around five months prior.
October and November tend to be joint business planning season — the period when annual commercial negotiations with major brand owners dominate the buyer’s diary. Approaching a buyer with a cold pitch in October is not just poor timing. It is an indicator that you have not understood how the channel works.
Do your homework before you approach. Go into the stores. Study the range. A pitch that treats one retailer as interchangeable with any other tells the buyer everything.
And think beyond the head buyer. Retailers have certain branches with dedicated specialists — trained staff who actively guide customers on the shop floor. Building relationships with them as well as the wider marketing team, the supply chain contacts, and store managers where possible helps. It is the ecosystem that actually moves product and the brands that earn their space work the whole organisation, not just one inbox.
Penrhos: How the right bottle opens the right door
Penrhos Spirits is based at Penrhos Farm in Herefordshire. The origin story is a good one. Surplus fruit from the family farm that was considered imperfect for the shop shelf, became the starting point for a spirits operation.
The gin is bottled in 100% recycled aluminium, with a claimed 91% reduction in carbon footprint versus standard glass.
I’ve been a fan of the range and the team for a while, and while they have always been good, it’s fair to say that they were just one of many gin producers in the UK until they changed their packaging. The move to an aluminium bottle became the most visible differentiator on shelf and changed their trajectory.
“The aluminium bottle is a very visible signal of what we stand for — reducing waste, rethinking material and doing things differently. It gives shoppers a clear reason to believe we’re not just another gin brand.“
Harriet Dawes
That bottle got them into Sainsbury’s head office within a week of sending a sample. The buyer introduced them directly to the Future Brands team, bypassing the standard application route entirely.
The Sainsbury’s Future Brands programme is worth understanding in detail, because it is the most structured formal route into UK grocery currently available to independent producers. What it actually provides is not widely known.
I think it’s probably one of the best pathways to help support producers and coach them into understanding what’s needed. Beyond the listing itself there are quarterly meetings with both the buyer and a dedicated grow partner, clearer sight lines into category decision-making, guidance on in-store presentation, free POS and a magazine feature in the first 12 weeks.
There’s also sampling in 50 stores as well as secondary plinth space alongside other Future Brands (which quickly became Penrhos’s best-performing locations), and seven-day payment terms.
That last point is not a footnote. For a small producer cash-flowing a 15,000-bottle first order, distilled and bottled at the farm, payment terms are a material part of what makes the listing commercially viable.
“I learnt a HUGE amount and genuinely felt so taken care of. You’re given a clearer line of sight into the buyer and category team than you would typically expect at this stage, which helps you understand not just what to do, but why decisions are being made.“
Harriet Dawes
What it does not do however – is earn the space for you. You still have to sell and prove you belong on that shelf.
James Gin: The communications agency that happens to sell gin
Vishal Patel, CEO of James Gin, describes the brand as ‘a communications agency that happens to sell a rather tasty gin.’ It is an unusually direct description of what actually drives their commercial advantage — and why the brand’s grocery performance cannot be understood purely through the lens of James May’s profile.
James Gin launched into Waitrose in April 2025, straight into 200 stores. No regional trials. Patel makes a case for why:
“The fact that we are the most followed gin brand in the world with over 1.6m followers and we get 12m organic views on our socials per month was enough to convince the buyer that this was a brand that had pull and not just push.“
Vishal Patel
That distinction matters. Pull is consumer demand that arrives at the shelf without the brand having to create it inside the store. Push is everything the brand does to move product once it is there. Most craft brands are almost entirely push. James Gin had measurable pull before the listing was agreed.
The expansion to 230 stores within six months came because social engagement was translating into customers going into store and buying the gin where they knew it was available — visibly increasing the rate of sale through demonstrated consumer demand.
James Gin is a good brand to study to understand the pre-awareness work that needs to go into supporting sell-through. They are highly effective at it. It’s also a good reminder that successfully launching into the grocery channel involves deploying significant budget.
Despite having the aforementioned ‘pull’ – the launch investment was real and specific.
Ads in the Waitrose magazine. A staff lunch at head office. James May standing in a shop window on Oxford Street for 30 minutes. Social content amplified to drive awareness of the listing. A neck tag added to the bottle with a large photo of James holding a giant parsnip — because the number of people who know James May but do not know he has a gin is, it turns out, surprisingly large.
“It’s a simple but effective way to stop shoppers in their tracks and pick up a bottle with a photo of a familiar man holding a giant parsnip.“
Vishal Patel
Spending money or building organic pull to drive sales aside (they do both), what I keep returning to with James Gin is this. They know their customers well enough that they know they will travel to the shelf to find them.
Not discover them there — arrive looking for a bottle.
According to Patel, on average, 35% of James Gin customers are new to the retailer. Not new to gin. New to Waitrose. That is incremental revenue in the BWS aisle and beyond. For a buyer managing category P&L, that is a genuinely powerful argument — and one that most craft brands have never thought to quantify.
It’s an important one too, as Patel is clear-eyed about the limits of the celebrity advantage.
“Scale and repeat purchase will not come from the fame of the celebrity behind the brand. A great tasting product with an enticing brand world consumers want to be part of is more important to achieve this.“
Vishal Patel
Celebrity backing shortens the runway to trial. But just as a ‘future brand’ accelerator can’t earn the space for you – in this case the product and the brand world still have to carry a lot to make it successful. “After all, there are only so many bottles of gin a single James May fan can buy.” – Vishal Patel
Isle of Barra: When place is the product
The Isle of Barra Distillers are based on one of the most remote inhabited islands in Scotland, in the Outer Hebrides. Their signature botanical is Carrageen seaweed — a red algae native to the cool Atlantic waters surrounding the island, sustainably hand-harvested from the coastline.
The bottle is custom-designed, made from 52% recycled glass, 17% lighter than its predecessor, sourced 406 miles from the distillery. Before a word is read, the bottle communicates both place and what the liquid contains. And it took three years to get right.
“It’s an absolutely beautiful bottle. It tells the story of Barra — where we are, the remoteness, the sea — all before you even pick it up. Once you do pick it up and feel it, it brings you to that remote island life.“
Michael Morrison
That patience was deliberate. The brand felt the pressure to move to a custom bottle earlier. They chose not to. They waited until it could be done properly, working closely with designer, D8. The bottle has since picked up numerous design awards. More importantly, it opened the door to Waitrose.
The Waitrose journey began with a LinkedIn message in June 2021. By January 2023, Isle of Barra was on Waitrose shelves in 127 branches. That gap, roughly two years from first contact to listing, included multiple conversations and a substantial period of commercial and supply chain preparation.
The rate of sale supported the case for growth thereafter. The listing expanded from 127 to 209 stores. From there, they moved into Sainsbury’s, and then into Tesco. Three major supermarkets. Each earned on learnings made on the back of the last.
Keeping velocity high has required the same thinking that runs through everything Isle of Barra does: lean into what only they can offer.
“What can we bring that no other brand on the shelf can do? Since we’ve started, it’s simple: it’s Barra.“
Michael Morrison
In practice, that means a monthly competition to win a trip for two to the Isle of Barra — flown from Glasgow, landing on the beach runway at Barra Airport, the only airport in the world where scheduled public flights land on a beach. A hotel, dinner, a private distillery tour, and a bottle of the gin. The competition now generates hundreds of entries per month.
Buy a bottle in a supermarket. Photograph the receipt. Enter the draw. It is a mechanic any brand could run. What makes it work is that the prize is irreplaceable — because only Isle of Barra can offer Barra.
On commercial preparation, Morrison was clear about what going in properly prepared looks like.
“Anyone looking to break into major grocers needs to go in with a clear understanding that promotions will play a role — and your numbers have to stack up. The focus is on keeping your cost of sales as low as possible and protecting your gross profit margin, even when pricing is reduced.“
Michael Morrison
His advice to a brand just offered its first supermarket listing is also worth heeding.“Give it everything you’ve got, because it is such a difficult place to break into. Range reviews are once or twice a year — you can easily find yourself on the shelf and easily find yourself off the shelf. So it’s about keeping that momentum going, being really cautious of the numbers.” – Michael Morrison
The promotional cycle: The part almost nobody models fully before they sign
The commercial side of a grocery listing is where most craft brands arrive underprepared.
Approximately 50% of spirits sold at Waitrose in a given week are on deal. Most other supermarkets trade in very similar ways.
It is the structural reality of how the category works, and brands need to plan for it from day one — not as an occasional cost, but as a permanent feature of the trading environment.
The cycle broadly works like this: a product rotates onto a promotional price, returns to full price, then rotates again. The margin on promotional weeks is substantially lower. Depending on the depth of the offer and your cost structure, some of those periods can trade at very thin margin indeed.
The subtler problem is what repeated cycles do to price perception. If a shopper first encounters your gin at £25 on promotion, the £34 shelf price starts to feel like the overcharge. I can’t remember the last time I bought our household staple, Plymouth gin, at anything other than £20. Its regular price is £32.
I’m not unique here. Gin is not a time-sensitive purchase. And for brands whose discount cycles happen every 6 weeks, it’s easy to plan ahead. Shoppers learn to wait for the deal and repeat purchase becomes conditional on discount.
“Discounting definitely drives trial and increases your rate of sale, which is important early on — but you don’t want to train customers to only buy on deal. We’ve been quite deliberate about how and when we promote, making sure it aligns with key moments rather than becoming constant.“
Harriet Dawes
The answer is not to avoid promotion though. Buyers expect participation and the commercial model depends on it. The answer is to build the promotional commitment into your pricing architecture before the listing is agreed, with enough headroom to sustain promotional periods without the business going backwards.
Beyond promotion, the full cost of a listing includes logistics and distribution infrastructure, label and barcode compliance, any listing fees or retros agreed commercially, and the ongoing marketing investment required to keep the rate of sale moving. These rack up. Small brands consistently underestimate the total commitment a grocery listing demands.
“You have to go in with your eyes open and understand that promotion is part of the grocery model. The challenge is balancing visibility with brand integrity — something we struggled with at the beginning.“
Harriet Dawes
When did buying a bottle in a supermarket start to feel like stealing one?
There is something changing in UK supermarkets that I believe the craft spirits industry is not confronting directly enough.
The in-store experience around alcohol is deteriorating.
Security measures on spirits have become extreme in some stores. Entire shelves wrapped in black netting in Tesco. Spirits locked behind plexiglass in Sainsbury’s. Dummy cards in Co-Op replacing physical bottles — you carry the card to a cashier and redeem the actual bottle from behind the till.
The reasons are understandable. Retail theft is real. Financial pressure on supermarkets is real. But the side effect is structural for craft spirits brands.
The one moment that might convert a browser into a buyer — picking up an unfamiliar bottle, reading the back label, feeling the weight and tactility of the bottle — is being removed.
Brand cues disappear behind dummy cards and printed photographs. Packs cannot be held when kept out of reach. The shelf story that a small distillery has spent years developing cannot be told through netting.
For a brand whose entire value proposition sits in its packaging, its specificity of place, its distinctiveness — this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a break in the path to purchase that the brand has no ability to fix.
The commercial response is already happening. James Gin’s approach to building awareness is where most producers are trying to head. Penrhos has rebuilt their entire awareness strategy around the reality that in-store discovery alone cannot be relied upon. They are investing more heavily in PR precisely because national availability means most shoppers have a Sainsbury’s nearby.
“Being available nationally it has given us a chance to push and invest more in PR as we know most people have a Sainsbury’s locally to them. If someone walks in already knowing the brand, the in-store environment becomes easier rather than a discovery moment.“
Harriet Dawes
It is the right response. It is also a significant additional cost. Morrison at Isle of Barra draws a clear line between what he accepts and what concerns him.
“Netting and locked cabinets… you’re all in the same boat, the brand beside you has netting on it as well. But restricted browsing, the idea of alcohol being hidden behind a complete cupboard or a door, is something I’d be strongly against. The consumer still needs to see what they want to buy.”
Michael Morrison
My fear is larger than a few security measures curtailing discovery. it’s the inevitability of the next step if left unchallenged.
Anti-alcohol campaigners have long argued for spirits to be sold out of sight. That they should be behind shutters, away from casual browsing. Security measures introduced for theft prevention are quietly producing something that begins to resemble that outcome.
Not by policy, but by commercial pressure. That is worth naming as it will become the norm if too few protest against it. And once it is the norm, the final step — mandatory out-of-sight display — is no longer a dramatic policy leap. It is no longer a big inconvenience to implement. It is just the next logical move.
You can already see the endpoint in the smaller formats. Sainsbury’s Local, Tesco Express — fewer brands, often behind the till, dominated by value and multinational products. Space and theft economics make that an understandable compromise. But it would be a significant loss if the larger stores moved the same way.
And if you have stood trying to browse the spirits aisle in a central London Tesco or a large Morrisons recently like I have researching this article, you will already know the almost hostile, rushed and judgemental feeling that security theatre creates when you are trying to browse.
So while discovery must increasingly happen before the shelf — through PR, digital outreach, and sustained brand building — we also need to actively challenge the erosion going on. We need to actively challenge the normalisation of it.
Browsing a drinks aisle should not feel like an illicit act.
The moment we stop saying so, we have ceded more ground than we realise — both as a trade and as a society.
What the grocery channel actually rewards, and who it is right for
Supermarket listings are not for every gin brand. It is not the right channel at every stage of a brand’s development either.
The brands that succeed share a set of characteristics.
A shelf hook that works without explanation. One visible, tangible, legible reason to pick the bottle up — something that communicates in two seconds to a shopper who has not come looking for you.
A commercial model built for the realities of grocery from day one. Margin architecture that accounts for promotional periods. Pricing that works for the supermarket, the consumer, and the business simultaneously. The discipline to model a promotional cycle before you agree to one.
Supply chain reliability. The ability to service stores consistently, without gaps or delivery failures. For a small producer, this almost always requires a logistics partner with the right infrastructure already in place. That partnership is a cost of the channel, not an optional extra.
The willingness to invest beyond the supermarket listing. In consumer awareness, trade engagement, and building relationships with the store-level staff who will recommend your product. In the media and marketing activity that drives someone to reach for your bottle rather than the one next to it.
And lastly – a clear-eyed view of the moment we are in.
The supermarket shelf is more focused than it has been in a decade. The consumer is spending more carefully. The discovery environment inside stores is under real pressure. The buyer is managing a P&L with very little slack.
None of that is an argument against grocery. It is an argument for going in properly prepared, or not going in yet.
A distillery on a Hebridean island, a farm in Herefordshire, a TV presenter — all three now sit alongside Hendrick’s and Tanqueray on supermarket shelves. That is genuinely remarkable.
But in all the awe, wonder and pride that goes into ranging and in being selected and listed – remember that the shelf does not care how you got there. It only cares whether the bottle keeps moving.
